Electricity prices in all 50 states

How to read this state table

Each row represents one of the 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia. The residential, commercial, and industrial columns show the most recent stored annual-frequency average revenue per kilowatt-hour by sector, rounded to the nearest tenth of a cent. Sector definitions follow the U.S. Energy Information Administration: residential covers single-family homes and apartments; commercial covers offices, retail, and small institutional buyers; industrial covers large-load manufacturing, mining, and similar high-throughput operations. RateWatt uses the annual price field returned by EIA's retail-sales API and keeps it separate from monthly observations.

The residential column is a statewide benchmark, not a proxy for an individual household's tariff or bill. A ranking can show where annual averages differ, but it cannot establish the cause of a state's position. A current causal explanation would require utility tariffs, regulator records, customer mix, operating context, and the timing of the costs being examined. The same boundary applies to commercial and industrial values.

The spread between sectors is an arithmetic comparison of EIA averages. It does not identify cross-subsidies, contract terms, service voltage, load shape, or a utility's cost allocation. Those interpretations need sources that are not present in this table.

For a deeper read, click any state name to view its multi-year price history, generation mix, and sector-by-sector breakdown. The rankings page sorts the same data by single dimensions (cheapest residential, most renewable, highest consumption), and the trends page shows how each state's rates have moved year-over-year. Read our methodology for how we compute averages and what's excluded from each sector total. RateWatt does not modify EIA values; we present them in a comparable format with explicit source attribution on every page so you can verify any figure against the original federal series.

A few caveats. First, statewide averages mask significant within-state variation between urban and rural service territories and among utility tariffs. Second, EIA's average retail price represents revenue divided by sales and includes delivered costs in aggregate; it does not preserve the line items or eligibility rules on one account. Third, the newest annual-frequency API period can differ from the latest finalized detailed Form EIA-861 file and may be revised by EIA. Fourth, generation-mix shares reported elsewhere in RateWatt cover utility-scale generation only and may under-count rooftop solar, behind-the-meter storage, and small distributed generation in states with substantial residential-PV adoption.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration retail-sales API; generation context uses separate EIA generation series.